Of course there are differences. Helene’s hair has not been cut since the accident, while Shelby shaved her head the day she came home from the psych ward. She’s kept it that way so that when she does venture as far as the 7-Eleven for magazines and snacks, people treat her gently, as though she were a cancer patient. Whenever someone whispers, That’s the girl who was driving when Helene had the accident, it’s even worse than if she’d had cancer. The way they look at her. They all have big eyes like in those velvet paintings. They both pity her and blame her. She and Helene were always together. Two peas in a pod. Pretty girls who glided through without a care. How can she go on living after she’s ruined her best friend’s life? They cluck at the skinny, bald girl in big boots. They think she wants compassion, but all she wants is to be left alone. Shelby only goes out after dark, her hat pulled down low. She wears gloves, scarves, and a fat down jacket that makes her shapeless and anonymous. And still, everybody knows.
Shelby and Helene are no longer alike. Shelby’s eyes register images; she eats, poorly, all junk food, but it’s not the feeding tube Helene survives on. Shelby walks, she talks, she goes down to Main Street once or twice a month—on the bus—no more driving for her, that’s for damn sure—to buy weed from a guy they barely knew in high school, Ben Mink. Ben is lanky and tall, with long hair he ties back, sometimes with a shoelace when he can’t find a rubber band. He’s geeky and smart. In high school, Shelby and Helene didn’t know he was alive. They were in the popular crowd of achievers, planning their college visits, going to parties on Friday nights. He hadn’t run with the same crowd—Ben didn’t have a crowd. He used to amble around with a book under his arm, usually something by Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut. He went on a Shirley Jackson kick, reading all of her books in a twenty-four-hour period, which landed him with a prescription for Prozac. Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page. Helene joked he was related to werewolves, because he had a scruffy beard even then. Shelby and Helene both had a fear of wolves, for one was said to have escaped from a cage in someone’s basement and it had never been caught. Run, Helene would say when they walked through the woods, vowing that she heard howling.
For years Ben kept his sunglasses on even at night so he didn’t have to look anyone in the eye. Because he believed in aliens and literature he was a target. People called him Ben Stink, if they bothered to call him anything at all. Shelby barely remembers him, but that was then. Now they’re comfortable with each other, if being comfortable is possible for either of them. When they meet they sit in a nearby park, mostly in silence, two loners who can barely make it through their own lives. As dusk falls they sometimes share a joint and talk about teachers they hated most. Shelby managed to get decent grades from even the toughest ones, but now she lets her true feelings out. She doesn’t have to be a good girl anymore. Whenever she talks about high school, Shelby takes out her house key and digs it into the palm of her hand until she bleeds. No miracle. That’s Helene’s business. Shelby’s blood is strictly a penance. It’s for real.
“I don’t think you should do that,” Ben said to her when he realized what she was doing, drawing her own blood while she sat beside him.
“You think?” she goaded him. “That’s a surprise. Did you know we used to think you were a werewolf?”
Shelby guessed he’d stalk away, insulted, and maybe that’s what she wanted to happen. Her aloneness, after all, is all she has. Instead Ben said, “I’m just worried about you.”
“Don’t be,” Shelby warned him.
“I wouldn’t mind being a werewolf,” he said, which only made Shelby feel guiltier about all those years they’d made fun of him.